Kruse Kronicle

Americans Cut Back on Visits to Doctor

Wall Street Journal: Americans Cut Back on Visits to Doctor

Insured Americans are using fewer medical services, raising questions about whether patients are consuming less health care as they pick up a greater share of the costs.

The drop in usage is showing up as health-care companies report financial results. Insurers, lab-testing companies, hospitals and doctor-billing concerns say that patient visits, drug prescriptions and procedures were down in the second quarter from year-ago levels.

"People just aren't using health-care like they have," said Wayne DeVeydt, WellPoint Inc.'s chief financial officer, in an interview Wednesday. "Utilization is lower than we expected, and it's unusual." ...

... Continued weak demand could eventually put downward pressure on spiralling health-care costs, a long-sought goal of policy makers. It could also force insurers to lower premiums.

The new trend comes amid a broader drop in health-care use as more Americans lose their jobs and their health insurance. Such cutbacks have happened before in recessions, but the drop seems to be more pronounced this time, industry analysts say.

More Americans also are buying high-deductible health plans that force them to bear more of the upfront costs for health services. Some 18 million Americans bought high-deductible plans this year, compared with 13 million last year, according to Paul Mango, a director at consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

At the beginning of the year, Dan and Natalie Johnson, of Gig Harbor, Wash., used the website eHealthInsurance.com to buy a new plan with a high deductible, now set at $5,500 for their family. Their previous coverage had no deductible.

Now, the couple says they are thinking twice before scheduling doctor visits. Recently, when their 16-year-old daughter's allergy prescription ran out, Ms. Johnson called the allergist's office to ask for a renewal, without coming in for an appointment, as she would have done under their previous insurance. ...

... People are "visiting fewer primary care doctors and specialists," said Chief Executive Tom Ryan, in a conference call with analysts. ...

But as Mark Perry points out from this article, MinuteClinic visits up 36% in Q2:

WOONSOCKET, R.I.  (Jul. 28) Fewer physician visits have contributed to a lift in visits to MinuteClinic as patients look for convenient and cost-effective access to healthcare services.

"Recent reports by IMS have indicated that fewer people are visiting doctors. We see this data on the fourth quarter versus the first quarter of this year, and we are expecting to see the same in the second quarter," Tom Ryan, chairman and CEO of CVS Caremark, told analysts during Wednesday morning's second-quarter conference call. "[Patients] are visiting fewer primary care doctors and specialists. Obviously, the sluggish economy and continued high unemployment has impacted peoples' ability to afford physician visits."

Clearly, this trend, coupled with MinuteClinic's expansion of service offerings and increased awareness, has helped drive the MinuteClinic business, as people in need of convenient and affordable health care take advantage of MinuteClinic's portfolio of roughly 500 clinics in 25 states and the District of Columbia.

MinuteClinic visits rose 36% during the second quarter, according to Ryan. That is significant growth, especially since last year included the impact of H1N1. "We believe that MinuteClinic's strong growth reflects our expansion of services and the improved awareness around our clinical offerings," Ryan said.

As previously reported by Drug Store News, MinuteClinic has been working to increase the number of services offered, specifically those services for patients with chronic illnesses. For example, in April, the clinic operator announced the introduction of its health-condition monitoring services, dubbed Monitoring Made Easy, for patients with diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and asthma.

Claire McCaskill grills Arlington administrators

I differ with my senator on many issues and I get weary of all the feigned indignation at political hearings, but this strikes me as genuine outrage over something outrageous. Way to go senator.

Kronicler Update

Your humble Kronicler is presently hunkered down at an undisclosed hideout in the southern Indiana hills leading a retreat with the General Assembly Mission Council of the PCUSA. Actually, we are working on converting the retreat into an advance but that's another story. Just wanted to inform you that my time for posts and responses will be limited the rest of the week but I will be monitoring activity. So no funny business.

Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

Religion Dispatches: Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

Under the radar of most observers a trend is emerging of evangelicals converting to Catholicism.

... McKnight first identified these converts eight years ago, and the trend has continued to grow in the intervening years. It shows up in a variety of places, in the musings of the late Michael Spencer (the “Internet Monk”) about his wife’s conversion and his decision not to follow, as well as at the Evangelical Theological Society where the former President and Baylor University professor Francis J. Beckwith made a well-documented “return to Rome.” Additionally, the conversion trend is once again picking up steam as the Millennial generation, the first to be born and raised in the contemporary brand of evangelicalism, comes of age. Though perhaps an unlikely setting, The King’s College, an evangelical Christian college in New York City, provides an excellent case study for the way this phenomenon is manifesting itself among young evangelicals. ...

Love Where You Live

Christianity Today: Love Where You Live

Urban, suburban, and rural churches respond to new challenges in a less mobile era. ...

... If the latest figures on geographic mobility are any indication, we would be wise to make nice with those neighbors. Despite commercial air travel, interstate highways, mobile phones, and e-mail, the mobility rate has declined steadily since the U.S. Census Bureau began tracking such data in 1948. In the aftermath of World War II, as suburbs began sprouting from farmland, a record 21.2 percent of Americans moved between 1950 and 1951. But only 13.2 percent of Americans moved between 2006 and 2007. Then in April 2009, the Census Bureau reported that a mere 11.9 percent of Americans moved in 2008. This rate was the lowest in recorded U.S. history, and the 1.3 percent drop between 2007 and 2008 was the second-largest one-year decline. The number rebounded only barely in 2009, to 12.5 percent.

With more Americans than ever staying put, I visited three churches—one urban, one suburban, and one rural—to see how the body of Christ is loving where its members live. ...

Future of Mainline Protestantism

Patheos: Future of Mainline Protestantism

Solidly established in American society, mainline Protestantism faces a threshold. How will it retool itself for a new century? How will it develop new avenues of ministry and new ways of doing community? How will the growing progressive and emergent movements affect Protestant thought and practice? How will denominational bodies respond to the well-documented "mainline decline?" How will pop culture reflect and be impacted by the changes in mainline Christianity? Patheos invites the visioning of Protestant thinkers in its Future of Religion series. Contributors include: Sam Alexander, Jim Burklo, Jerry D. Campbell, Philip Clayton, Monica A. Coleman, Kenda Creasy Dean, James Calvin Davis, Bruce G. Epperly, Greg Garrett, Larry M. Goodpaster, Anne Howard, James J. Kang, David LaMotte, Lisa Larges, Brian McLaren, J. Ryan Parker, Anthony B. Pinn, Bruce Reyes-Chow, Robert John Russell, Josef Sorett, Adam Walker Cleaveland, Peter Wallace, and James K. Wellman Jr.

See the daily symposium on this topic at the Mainline Protestant Portal Blog, Faith Forward.

Emerging Church and Mainliners

I've been saying for years that much of the emerging church in is simply Evangelicals embracing Mainline Protestant theology while experiencing reticence about Mainline institutions. While "emerging church" encompasses a broad range of expression, in the Mainline world it is almost monotone. Emerging Mainliners have little dispute with Mainline theology or the deep commitment to progressive/liberal politics. It is overwhelmingly about polity, structures, and frustration with lethargy. In this sense it is not truly post-evangelical and post-Mainline ... that is ...  it is not truly emergent. The Mainline emerging church does not embrace the emerging church movement because it is something new but precisely because it dovetails so perfectly with their theological and political persuasions. And it really borders on comical to listen to some emerging church types describe the profound new reality that is emerging when in fact they are describing what Mainliners have been saying for decades. It is new and emerging to them only because their horizons have been so small.

At the PCUSA General Assembly this month, Landon Whitsitt, a pastor in my presbytery in the Kansas City metro (Heartland Presbytery) became vice-moderator for the denomination. On some issues I'm sure Landon and I are very different (for one thing, I don't have a PCUSA tattoo on my forearm) but read what he said in a recent interview with columnist Bill Tammeus:

What can the Emergent Church Movement, which has come primarily out of the evangelical branch of the church, teach the Mainline churches? On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is that movement?

"I don't know if ECM can 'teach' the Mainline anything, frankly. I have always kind of thought that the ECM is the vehicle that is dragging Evangelicalism into a form of faith similar to what the mainline churches experience.

"I'm sure they'd disagree, but, as an example, a lot of folks in the ECM are jazzed to the hilt about Walter Brueggemann right now. I'm so sick of Bureggemann after reading countless books during seminary. They love N.T. Wright. I'm not trying to be rude when I point out that those are Mainline folks.

"What the ECM challenges us on, however, is our creativity. We've gotten liturgically and politically lazy. No one wants to be a part of a bureaucratic institution anymore and no one wants to spend a hour on Sunday morning sitting through what is essentially a business meeting with some hymns. But 'emergence' in general (a la Tickle): This is nothing short of our age's Reformation. ...

Landon is spot on. I'd also add that unlike some other segments of the ECM, within the Mainline, to be emerging is close to synonymous with being politically progressive in your cultural engagement. And in that sense, it feels to me very much like the emergence of a progressive tribalism that simply is a mirror of, say, Southern Baptist conservative tribalism. Whether all this is a good thing or bad thing is all dependent on your perspective I'm sure. But I don't think it is emergent in the sense of coming a deep reassessment of what it means to be the church and of our engagement with the world. It is the extension of Mainline sensibilities with new modes of relating.

Britain Plans to Decentralize Health Care

New York Times: Britain Plans to Decentralize Health Care

LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.

Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.

Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.

The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished. ...

Motivating change

Call and Response: Motivating change

... I thought of the recent book on leading change by Alan Deutschman, “Change or Die.” Deutschman says people generally try to motivate change by using, “The Three F’s: Facts, Fear and Force.” The grim facts are related. If that doesn’t work we try to generate fear. “With numbers like these, we’ll be dead in another ten years.” Force is final strategy. “We’re forced to close these churches, to sell the church camp,” and so on. Despite their popularity, the three F’s don’t work.

Deutschman offers an alternative set of approaches, handily dubbed, “The Three R’s: Relate, Repeat and Reframe.” He derives these strategies for motivating and leading change from three extended case studies, one from the world of medicine (patients with heart disease), one from penal institutions (convicted felons) and a third from business (an auto production and assembly plant).

“Relate” is something most capable pastors understand. It means building trust and relationship. The key step is establishing a bond. We learn from teachers we love and who love us. Sometimes I run into congregations that have been down but are newly vital and alive. When they speak of their pastor they say, “She’s got us believing in ourselves again,” or “She’s helping us have some fun.” Or simply, “She loves us.”

By “repeat,” Deutschman means that change involves learning new skills and behaviors and repeating them until they become part of who we are. People with heart disease learn changes in diet and new habits like yoga and exercise. What’s the parallel in the church?

For some congregations, it’s learning practices of hospitality. For others it may be learning the skills for faith sharing, what some call testimony. For others it may be training lay leaders. One congregation I know has learned a set of skills around small group Bible study that have permeated the congregation.

I find particularly interesting that “reframe” comes last in Deutschman’s scheme. Reframing offers new ways of understanding. In the church it might be something like the concepts involved in a shift from “institutional” to “missional church.” In Deutschman’s case studies you don’t start with a whole new set of ideas. You start with new behaviors. The ideas come later after behaviors have changed. ...

$35 computer introduced in India

Christian Science Monitor: $35 computer introduced in India

$35 computer is targeted at school-age children and older in the rapidly developing nation.

It looks like an iPad, only it's 1/14th the cost: India has unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touchscreen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.

If the government can find a manufacturer, the Linux operating system-based computer would be the latest in a string of "world's cheapest" innovations to hit the market out of India, which is home to the 100,000 rupee ($2,127) compact Nano car, the 749 rupees ($16) water purifier and the $2,000 open-heart surgery.

The tablet can be used for functions like word processing, web browsing and video-conferencing. It has a solar power option too — important for India's energy-starved hinterlands — though that add-on costs extra. ...

Levi Johnston Is an Insult to Working-Class Men

Slate: Levi Johnston Is an Insult to Working-Class Men (HT: Travis Greene)

... But it's not true that working-class men are stuck in a patriarchal past that middle- and upper-class men have overcome. Among working-class men who do marry, their behavior as husbands and fathers is surprisingly enlightened, according to many recent surveys. Blue-collar couples are less likely than educated professional ones to endorse the abstract idea of men and women going against gender stereotype and sharing household activities. But overall, working-class husbands actually wind up doing more housework than middle- and upper-class men. Partly this is because there is more work to be done—for men and women alike. Sociologist Scott Coltrane reminds us how much effort it takes to shop, cook, and clean when one must take the bus to hunt for the best deals at grocery stores and bargain outlets, use the laundromat rather than one's own washer, and maintain an old house or apartment without being able to hire other working class and immigrant women to do the work for you. Coltrane's own research with working-class white men and Latino fathers revealed that they did the shopping and transported their kids as often, if not more often, than their middle-class counterparts, and did just as much routine cooking and cleaning.

College-educated men in marriages where both spouses work standard shifts do more child care, on average, than their low-income counterparts. But working-class men and women are far more likely to schedule separate work shifts so that each can watch the child. As a result, a higher proportion of working-class fathers are the primary caretakers while their wives are at work.

In the 1960s and 1970s, highly-educated men whose wives were employed did much more housework than their less-educated counterparts. But that has changed over time. In a forthcoming paper, Oxford researcher Oriel Sullivan finds that during the 1980s and 1990s, husbands who did not graduate from high school and who were married to working women began to catch up. Today they equal or even exceed the housework contributions of their counterparts with higher levels of education. ...

Also this observation:

Finally, let's not forget that high-income men bring their own set of problems to marriage. Many seem especially vulnerable to what researchers Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling call the "career mystique," the idea that a successful work-life requires them to commit all their time and energy to the job and to delegate caretaking responsibilities to someone else. A recent study by Joan Williams and Heather Boushey  found that 38 percent of high-earning professional men and almost one-quarter of middle-income men work more than 50 hours a week.

Two economic observations here. First, you have two men who need to get kids to a soccer game. One man who can earn an extra $20 for another hour worked and another man can earn $150 for another hour worked. At some point it becomes highly advantageous from a purely economic point of view to, if need be, hire someone to do many of your daily tasks. And the problem is, because you can earn so much more with an extra hour of work you are motivated to work longer hours, which leads to advancement and higher salaries, making it even more costly not to work.

While for many women, career is something to be incorporated in a life mix, I think many men still see their lives in terms of a career or nothing. In psychic terms and in social acceptance terms, it is still far easier for a women to drop out of the job market to raise children or do other pursuits. I think in aggregate men are still more driven by work than women.

A second observation is that the average man in the workforce works about 10% more hours than the average woman. The much bemoaned aggregate gender pay equity decreases significantly when average hours of work are factored in.

Social Network for Dummies

Source

Garment Factories, Changing Women’s Roles in Poor Countries

New York Times - Economix: Garment Factories, Changing Women’s Roles in Poor Countries

While visiting garment factories in Bangladesh on assignment recently, I met young women who had migrated from villages to the city in search of jobs that they needed to support their families back home. It is a fairly standard story in this part of the world.

What struck me, however, was how their journeys had changed them and their views about life. Take Maasuda Akthar, who moved to Gazipur, a town 30 miles outside  Dhaka, when she was 16 with her sister. (I wrote about her in this article about how the Bangladesh garment industry was benefiting from increased labor costs in China.) She married a man whom she met at the factory. As an experienced seamstress, she now makes more money than him. Ms. Akthar, 21, told me that her husband had offered to become the sole breadwinner in the home so that she could stay at home and “be comfortable,” but she refused because she enjoys working. Not only that, she told me she did not plan to have children for a few years.

My conversations with Ms. Akthar and the other woman appeared to confirm what economists, policy makers and businessmen had told me: By giving women an independent source of livelihood, Bangladesh’s garment industry has changed this conservative Muslim country’s society in immeasurable ways. (More than 80 percent of the three million people who work in the industry are women.) ...

... Mr. Mobarak also found that girls who live in villages with garment factories tend to marry later and have children later than the girls who grow up in villages without factories. In other countries, this has typically happened as women get more educated, but Mr. Mobarak’s survey of 1,500 families suggests that it is happening slightly differently in Bangladesh, which has a literacy rate of just 55 percent.

“Girls do seem to take advantage of these jobs at 17 to 19 years old, and that allows them to delay marriage and child bearing,” Mr. Mobarak told me in a telephone interview. “Even if it’s not happening through education, it is happening through work.” ...

... Wages in Bangladesh’s garment industry are among the lowest in the world. The minimum wage, which the government is expected to increase soon, is just 1,662 taka (about $23) a month. Labor groups are demanding a sharp increase and their protests and clashes with the police have periodically shut down factories in recent weeks.

Still hundreds of thousands of women flock to Dhaka and other garment hubs in Bangladesh every year because factories pay more than the women could earn in villages. ...

To Protest Hiring of Nonunion Help, Union Hires Nonunion Pickets

Wall Street Journal: To Protest Hiring of Nonunion Help, Union Hires Nonunion Pickets

Jobless Recruits Get Minimum Wage 'To March Around and Sound Off.'

WASHINGTON—Billy Raye, a 51-year-old unemployed bike courier, is looking for work.

Fortunately for him, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor.

"For a lot of our members, it's really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else," explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.

So instead, the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he's grateful for the work, even though he's not sure why he's doing it. "I could care less," he says. "I am being paid to march around and sound off."

Protest organizers and advocacy groups are reaping an unexpected benefit from continued high joblessness. With the national unemployment rate currently at 9.5%, an "endless supply" of the out-of-work, as well as retirees seeking extra income, are lining up to be paid demonstrators, says George Eisner, the union's director of organization. Extra feet help the union staff about 150 picket lines in the District of Columbia and Baltimore each day.

Online postings recruit paid activists for everything from stopping offshore drilling to defending the Constitution. ...

E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon

New York Times: E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon

Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.

Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.

The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.

Still, the hardcover book is far from extinct. Industrywide sales are up 22 percent this year, according to the American Publishers Association. ...

One of the things I wonder about is how e-books are affecting different genres. I'm not a big fiction reader. I suspect if I had a Kindle I might actually read more fiction because presently I don't want to pay for a hard copy that clutters my life and I don't want to got to the library to find fiction.

Most of what I buy is for learning and reference. I write notes in books and highlight key points. I still haven't seen an electronic version that works as well for me as having the hard copy. I suspect that there are others like me. So I wonder if some non-fiction genres will make the leap as quickly. We will see what technological innovations emerge but at present I'm still buying almost exclusively hard copy.

Consumers Resetting, Not Recovering

Media Post News: Consumers Resetting, Not Recovering

An extensive new study from NPD Group finds that no matter what's going on with the economy, people aren't so much recovering as they are resetting.

"Overall, consumers have reached this new equilibrium of spending and making decisions about things like groceries and apparel and electronics and automotive," Dee Warmath, SVP/Retail Insights for NPD, tells Marketing Daily. "The pie has shrunk, so each category is competing with another. So while there is a roving release of pent-up demand, there's not an overall increase in spending."

The Port Washington, N.Y.-based market research company interviewed some 71,000 consumers across eight categories, reviewing about 60 retailers and 75 brands per category. The new Retail & Brand Landscape Report then ranks each in terms of shopper engagement, shopper priorities, and shopper impressions.

And it found that while the recession changed shopping habits a little, in terms of store choice -- for example, people typically have about 4% more retailers in their consideration set than they did before the economy tanked -- it changed brand perception a lot. Consumers now typically have 20% more brands they will consider buying in any category, she says.

And above all, the recession sharpened their focus on value. "If consumers learned anything," she says, "it's that I can walk out of the store not buying something, and it will be okay." She says that even prior to the recession, there was clear evidence in consumers' losing trust in retailers. ...

The Technocracy Boom

New York Times (David Brooks): The Technocracy Boom

When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.

During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. ...

...In the second part of the period, Democrats were in control. They augmented the national security bureaucracy but spent the bulk of their energies expanding bureaucracies in domestic spheres.  ...

... When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.

Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.

This progressive era amounts to a high-stakes test. If the country remains safe and the health care and financial reforms work, then we will have witnessed a life-altering event. We’ll have received powerful evidence that central regulations can successfully organize fast-moving information-age societies.

If the reforms fail — if they kick off devastating unintended consequences or saddle the country with a maze of sclerotic regulations — then the popular backlash will be ferocious. Large sectors of the population will feel as if they were subjected to a doomed experiment they did not consent to. They will feel as if their country has been hijacked by a self-serving professional class mostly interested in providing for themselves.

If that backlash gains strength, well, what’s the 21st-century version of the guillotine? 

"It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems."

China 'leapfrogs US to become biggest energy user'

BBC: China 'leapfrogs US to become biggest energy user'

China has overtaken the United States to become the world's top energy consumer for the first time, a new report says.

Provisional figures from the International Energy Agency indicate that China's energy demand has doubled in a decade.

The IEA said China had taken first place because it was hit less hard than the US by the global financial crisis.

China challenged the report's findings, saying its figures were unreliable.

The US has been the biggest consumer of energy for more than 100 years. But China's rapid economic growth in the past two decades has pushed it into top spot, according to Tuesday's report.

The surge in demand for energy in China was further fuelled by its rising population.

Births by Mother's Race, Ethnicity and Marital Status: 2006

Pew Research

Rent a Friend for £6.50 an hour

Telegraph: Rent a Friend for £6.50 an hour

An internet entrepreneur is making friends available for hire at an hourly rate.

... The US-based site already has around 2,000 members, each paying up to £16 a month ($25) to access the site.

When they see a friend they like the look of, they can rent them for as little as £6.50 ($10) an hour.

Rosenbaum said he wanted to "go a step back" from dating sites and offer a service that was, in the words of his website "strictly platonic".

He told The Times: "No one was offering friendship."

The service is not just about getting people to meet up for a drink or a meal. It lists a host of diverse activities that members might like to hire friends for, including "teaching manners", "snowboarding", "family functions" and just "hanging out".  ...

What's Up with Shyamalan?

This graph comes from Marginal Revolution:

I think it's important to remember that Hitchcock's popularity took a nosedive before he had a revival. The same can be said with other directors and artists.

Decline in U.S. Maufacturing?

I frequently hear people bemoaning the fact that we are losing our manufacturing base. Usually people point to a sharp decline in manufacturing jobs. But take a look at this two graphs from Carpe Diem:

Manufacturing has not declined in the U. S. and it is not declining. What is happening is a continuation of trend over the past several decades of technology radically increasing productivity so that fewer humans are needed in the manufacturing process. But the amount of manufacturing continues to rise.

We are currently hearing the "green jobs" are going to save us but that appears unlikely. The green push is likely to create a few highly specialized technical jobs ... as with silicon valley and computing technology. The industries that will likely grow are those that can't be easily automated ... those that require more humans per unit of expanded service. Think health care for example.

For an interesting video about how technology makes workers and companies more productive, see how these little robots below help increase productivity by a factor of two to three. (HT: Carpe Diem)

A Seminar on Immigration (July 24 in Kansas City, KS)

I'm signed up for this event. I thought I would make sure my Kansas City area readers are aware as well. This event requires that you sign up and they expect to have more people wanting to come than there are spaces, so sign up quick.

From Adelante Express: Adelante Missions Institute Presents: A Seminar on Immigration

I am extremely excited to announce a special training opportunity to take place on Saturday, July 24 on the timely and important topic of immigration, sponsored by Mission Adelante, and co-sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals and Grandview Park Presbyterian Church. We have invited Dr. Danny Carroll, author of Christians at the Border and distinguished professor of Old Testament at Denver Seminary, to present a Biblical overview of issues related to immigration, especially relevant for all Christians who have a heart for serving the stranger in our midst.

Leith Anderson of the National Association of Evangelicals writes, "Immigration issues grip American politics and opinions. But what does the Bible say? What is at the heart of the Christian view on immigration? Danny Carroll's voice on this issue is like no other."

If you are interested in seeing a snapshot of Dr. Carroll's presentation, follow this link to see his talk at Willow Creek's Compassion and Justice seminar. Dr. Carroll was also a speaker at the annual Christian Community Development Association conference in 2009.

In addition to Dr. Carroll, we will also hear from Jenny Hwang, Director for Advocacy and Policy for World Relief's Refugee and Immigration Program and co-author of Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion and Truth in the Immigration Debate. Ms. Hwang will present a policy discussion on Immigration.

The event will be held on Saturday, July 24 at Grandview Park Presbyterian Church, 1613 Wilson Blvd., Kansas City, KS 66102, located just a couple of blocks from Mission Adelante. Please note that a fee of $20 per person will be collected at the door and child care will not be provided. The schedule for the day is as follows:

8:30 Doors open

9:00-12:00 Seminar by Dr. Daniel Carroll

12:00-1:00 Lunch, provided at the church

1:00-2:30 Policy discussion by Jenny Hwang

Space is limited, so please don't delay to register and to spread the word to anyone whom this event may interest. Because of limited space, we may not be able to accommodate walk-ins on the day of the seminar. You can register by filling out the form at this link: Register Now. This is the only way registration will be accepted.

Again, we are extremely excited about this event and feel that God has provided us with a unique opportunity to explore a Biblical perspective on a challenging issue that is especially relevant for our ministry. We would love for you to join us!

In His Grace,

Jarrett Meek

Executive Director, Mission Adelante

What Would Reagan Really Do?

Newsweek: What Would Reagan Really Do?

Some Republicans want to impose a Reaganite purity test on this fall’s candidates. Today, though, the 40th president himself wouldn’t pass it.

... The problem, then, is not that conservatives are searching for lessons in his record. It’s that they’re learning the wrong ones. In the years since Reagan left the White House, a vocal contingent of Republicans has sought to enforce current party orthodoxy—cut taxes at all costs; limit government spending (except defense); let the Bible be your guide—by insisting that Reagan was its source. But while these concepts often shaped Reagan’s campaign rhetoric, they didn’t define how he governed once in office. As a result, the Reagan that Republicans now revere—a mythical founder figure who always cut taxes, always rattled his saber, and always consulted Jesus—barely resembles the more pragmatic Reagan who actually ran the country. Only six months ago, the Republican National Committee considered subjecting all GOP candidates to a Reaganite purity test that Reagan himself would have failed. ...

... To recapture the Reagan magic, Republicans must stop pining for some imaginary past and start asking how the real Reagan would “get stuff done” today. Some answers seem clear: he would’ve opposed Obamacare, refused to impose new regulations on the oil industry, and resisted the idea that government can spend its way out of a recession. But other questions are more vexing. Would a 21st-century Reagan cut taxes even further? Would he ramp up defense spending in response to terrorism (as he did with the Soviet Union)? How would he handle the rise of China? What about gay marriage? Immigration? By focusing on how Reagan’s actual methods, principles, and governing style would translate to today’s Washington, Republicans can take advantage of what he still has to offer (a successful model of conservative leadership) instead of clinging to what’s no longer relevant (a dated set of policies). Could a Reaganesque approach help today’s GOP? Absolutely. But first the GOP has to understand what a Reaganesque approach actually is. ...

... In fact, much the opposite. In 1982, Reagan agreed to restore a third of the previous year’s massive cut. It was the largest tax increase in U.S. history. In 1983, he raised the gasoline tax by five cents a gallon and instituted a payroll-tax hike that helped fund Medicare and Social Security. In 1984, he eliminated loopholes worth $50 billion over three years. And in 1986, he supported the progressive Tax Reform Act, which hit businesses with a record-breaking $420 billion in new fees. When it came to taxation, there were two Reagans: the pre-1982 version, who did more than any other president to lighten America’s tax burden, and his post-1982 doppelgänger, who was willing (if not always happy) to compensate for gaps in the government’s revenue stream by raising rates. Today, a truly Reaganesque leader would recognize (like Reagan) that the heavy lifting was finished long ago; last year, for instance, taxes fell to their lowest level as a percentage of personal income since 1950. And he would dial back the antitax dogma as a result. ...

... For Republicans, Reagan is still relevant. But worshiping his myth—and pretending that his campaign promises and rhetoric represent his entire legacy—won’t help the GOP chart a path back to power. To do that, a new generation of leaders should study how the Gipper actually governed, then modernize his approach for today’s world. The result would be an optimistic, forward-looking politics centered on a few key priorities: reducing the deficit, matching military spending to current challenges, solving the immigration puzzle. It wouldn’t be an exact replica of Reagan’s 1980 platform. But it would be Reaganesque.

Right now, few Republicans have embraced this renewed Reaganism; Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels—a former Reagan staffer who’s raised taxes when necessary and who recently suggested that a “truce in the culture wars” would help Washington balance the budget—probably comes closest. But he’s no match for Reagan in the charisma department. To leave 1981 behind, Republicans will need more than an updated list of policy proposals; they’ll need a leader like Reagan—sunny, determined, sui generis—to sell it. Let the search for a new saint begin.

Median Duration of Unemployment

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Median Duration of Unemployment

Is There a Distinctively Anabaptist Witness?

The Politics of the Cross Resurrected: Is There a Distinctively Anabaptist Witness?

The Anabaptists like to think of themselves as a "Third Way" neither Protestant or Roman Catholic. Many Anabaptists also view their distinctive "peace witness" as neither left or right and disdain to be lumped in with either liberal Protestantism or conservative Evangelicalism. But if we focus on the middle-class, college-educated, urban Mennonites in North America for a moment, do they really offer a distinctively Anabaptist witness? ...

... The Amish and many conservative Mennonite groups do have a distinctively Anabaptist witness. They are a true "Third Way" because they actually withdraw from the power structures of society and strive to influence no one - preferring to strive for Christian perfection as a separate society.

But the middle-class, college-educated, increasingly urbanized Mennonites who write books, run the Mennonite Central Committee and teach in the colleges and seminaries have less and less of a distinctively Anabaptist witness as the years pass. They are increasingly difficult to see as being significantly different from liberal Protestantism. Maybe the 16th century Anabaptists simply were liberal Protestants several centuries ahead of their time. That is a depressing thought, but one that most contemporary Mennonites seem determined to make plausible.

Living in a material world

Christian Century: Living in a material world

... This critique echoes the routine laments that name materialism as the sum of the human problem. This is an analysis that invites the corollary suggestion that in order for all to be well, all we really need to do is be more spiritual. What I have come to believe, however, is that materialism is not exactly the problem, and that being more spiritual is not exactly the answer. ...

... This leads me to the most pregnant of ironies I have come to embrace about materiality. The problem, I think, is not so much that we like stuff too much; rather it's that we don't like it enough. Before you cry heresy, let me explain. We acquire things, but then quickly tire of the things that seemed so important when first obtained. We replace rather than repair because we have such fickle and passing romances with our things. The real soul danger is not exactly in liking things too much, nor in owning them, nor in caring for them well. In fact, there can be great virtue in such a caring relationship with physical things.

The soul danger lies in the insatiable longing to acquire new things one after another, more and more things, as if the getting of them somehow proves our worth in comparison with others, as if the having of them can fill the emptiness. It's this insatiable drive to acquire stuff rather than the stuff itself that's the problem.

The attempt to stuff more and more stuff into that unfilled place in our souls that only God can fill becomes, of course, idolatry—making what God made into god. The problem is not that this is a material world. Madonna got that part right; it is a material world. God made it that way, and as God said repeatedly, it is good, in fact very good. In Jesus Christ, God has definitively entered into that very good materiality to claim it, bless it and transform it.

The Economics of Belief

At Science and the Sacred today there is a post by Joel M. Martin, What Do Most Christians Really Believe About Evolution? He writes:

... But we live in a world that hungers for simple answers to complex problems. We Americans in particular seldom take the time to come to our own conclusions on complicated matters; we often defer to others to tell us what to do, how to feel, what to believe, how to think. I’m as guilty as anyone else here.

Rather than following a complicated regimen of exercise and diet, we look for a pill to help us lose weight. Rather than reading the president’s health plan, we want someone to summarize for us what’s wrong (or right) with it. Rather than studying the political landscape in detail, we rely on talk shows to find out how we should vote. Instead of increasing our science literacy, we adopt someone else’s take on cloning, or global warming, or the Gulf oil spill, or evolution. And there is no shortage of persons eager to step in to do just that, to distill the world’s major issues into simplistic terms. ...

I hear this complaint a lot, mostly from intellectual types like me. While a resonate with it in part, there is another part of me that says not so fast.

Imagine that I need a paper clip for a stack of papers. Which type of clip should I use? One of those traditional metal ones? Maybe one of those plastics ones? Or maybe one of the v-shaped things that open their jaws and then clasp the papers together? I suppose I could go on the internet to look for product reviews, buy samples and do some tests, and ask others about their experience with paper clips. If I did so you might think I had become a little eccentric. I would suggest the same is true for a great many on some of the issues that Martin lists above.

Most people do not have the compulsion to dig that deep. And for most, what is the relative benefit of nailing down nuanced aspects of evolution or having an expert grasp of the Gulf oil spill versus a) the impact these issues have for their daily lives, b) the ability they have to influence these issues if they knew more, and c) the cost they pay in forgoing other activities to develop expertise in these areas? 

Now I will say that I agree that more people should delve deeper into some of the issues but to expect the great majority of the population to delve deeply into every issue that confronts is not realistic. The economics of becoming that informed don't add up. To keep expecting depth of analysis can and should be so is to set your self up for continued frustration. (I do think that those who try to shape belief  ... whether Dawkins on religion, Mohler on evolution, or McLaren on economics ... should be held to a different standard.) And this is to me one of the great challenges I see: How to address complex issues is an age of information overload and busy lives?

Fighting Poverty in Kenya by Selling Water Pumps to Poor Farmers

NPR:Fighting Poverty in Kenya by Selling Water Pumps to Poor Farmers

... MARTIN FISHER, co-founder, KickStart International: It is cheap. It is extremely robust. It won't break down. It's very lightweight. You can carry it to the field. You can take the whole thing apart with your hands, put it back together, because a farmer doesn't even have a screwdriver in rural Africa.

SPENCER MICHELS: Even cheaper is a hip pump that KickStart also sells. Fisher, a mechanical engineer by training and a former Fulbright Scholar, co- founded KickStart 10 years ago, after discovering that large-scale rural water projects and programs to give farm equipment to poor Africans, projects he worked on, failed after a few years.

MARTIN FISHER: It's not very cheap, because you have to set up a whole distribution network to give things away. It completely kills local initiative. It kills the local private sector. And people don't really appreciate things that they get given. They don't use them fully.

SPENCER MICHELS: Instead KickStart sells its pumps to very poor farmers, with the promise that they can make money with it.

MARTIN FISHER: Their number-one need is a way to make more money. And, so, if you're going to sell them a tool or piece of equipment, it has to be a moneymaking device. If we buy something, we're going to make sure we use that thing, and especially when you're very poor.

SPENCER MICHELS: When Fisher began to sell, rather than give away, pumps, he was flying in the face of most social theory. He was treated as a heretic by some in the aid community. But he understood that quite well.

MARTIN FISHER: I went over to Africa as a socialist and came -- after about five or six years of hitting my head against the wall, became a small-C capitalist. And the thing is that it actually worked. ...

Civil union and marriage issues questions and answers (PCUSA)

Presbyterian News Service: Civil union and marriage issues questions and answers

The following is a Presbyterian News Service release.

A summary of the 219th General Assembly’s actions on issues of civil union and Christian marriage:

What did the General Assembly do? What has changed?

The General Assembly approved both the final report and the minority report of the Special Committee to Study Issues of Civil Union and Christian Marriage and ordered they be sent out for study by the wider church. The vote was 439 in favor, 208 against, with 6 abstentions. By this action (sending both reports for study) the Assembly maintained the definition of marriage as between “a man and a woman.” With the action to send the reports for study, no change has occurred, or is pending.

What does it mean?

The special committee report provides descriptive material on the historical and theological aspects of marriage, as well as a look at current laws on same-gender partnerships and their children, and the place of same-gender covenanted relationships in the Christian community. They commend to the church their covenant, “Those Whom God Has Joined, Let No One Separate” as a guide for Presbyterians to come together to discuss difficult issues when there is disagreement. The minority report, also approved for study by the Assembly, concludes that Scripture is clear that marriage is between a man and a woman only and does not support any kind of sexual behavior outside heterosexual marriage. The minority report also contains a covenant for the wider church to use.

What next?

The special committee report and the minority report will be prepared for distribution as one document to the wider church. By sending both reports to the wider church, it is the hope of the Assembly that Presbyterians will find helpful background information on civil unions and marriage, as well as material to help individuals and groups remain together as they work through these difficult issues.

Where can you learn more?

Read the majority report online

Read the minority report online

Changing of the Guard at GAMC

My term as chair of the General Assembly Mission Council began at the end of General Assembly. Friday night the stole was passed on to me by the previous chair,  Carol Adcock. Carol is the epitome of leadership with grace. She will be missed.

Below is a picture of Executive Director Linda Valentine, Carol Adcock, and yours truly.

Thank you, World Cup fans, I now understand institutions for development

Aid Watch: Thank you, World Cup fans, I now understand institutions for development

My original notion was that intentionally breaking the rules to prevent a loss was cheating, and that it was too bad norms prevalent in Football World did not penalize such behavior more fiercely so that it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. (A column in today’s Wall Street Journal agreed with me. Maybe we’re just both fervent Ghana fans.)

But let’s shift now from normative to positive economics. Do the norms in the Football World let you sometimes break the rules intentionally and suffer the official penalty, without any further normsy punishment of everlasting disgrace? ...

... Possible cautionary lesson #1: arrogant people (code word for Americans) should not pass judgment on other societies they don’t understand (like Football World).

Other people pointed out the complexities of rule systems that include penalties for breaking the rules. You don’t want excessively draconian penalties (like the death penalty for contract violations or handballs), or nobody would engage in mutually beneficial activities in the first place, like contracts or football matches. And, with that caveat, no penalty system can be perfectly designed so that it never pays to break the rules in any and all situations. Some egregious case where it paid to break the rule could cause an over-reaction towards excessive penalties or dysfunctional rules (possible examples in financial and economic reforms as well as football).

Norms play a useful role in not only strengthening the incentives to keep the formal rules, but also in complementing the formal rule-formal penalty system. Norms can handle the subtleties of when intentionally breaking the rules and accepting the penalty is OK and when it is not. So for example, social norms might forgive a businessman who chooses to break a contract because of something unforeseen like a fire in his factory, but not so much a businessman who lied about whether there was really a factory fire. ...

Soccer has a number of norms about fair play. In one of the  games a defender kicked the ball across the end line to stop play for an injured player. By rule, the opponents had a corner kick. Instead, the opponent's teammates stayed away from the goal as he placed the ball at the corner and tapped it to the opposing goalie.

There are times where the formal rules need not be followed, or it is appropriate to break them and take the consequences. Unfortunately, when incidences of this happen in business or with other interactions, some reformers point to them as instances where the system is broken. It can be evidence but not necessarily. There is no formulation of laws that will perfectly match justice in all situations. It is a very difficult balancing act.

Is Ministry a Job or Vocation?

Out of Ur: Is Ministry a Job or Vocation?

Eugene Peterson laments in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts  (Baker Books, 2010) that he has been “trying for fifty years now to be a pastor in a culture that doesn’t know the difference between a vocation and a job.” It was a bunch of artists that clued him in on the difference.

Definitions are in order. According to Peterson, a job is “an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated.” Most jobs come with job descriptions, so it “is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not…whether a job is done well or badly.” This, Peterson argues, is the primary way Americans think of the pastor (and, presumably, that pastors think of themselves). Ministry is “a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by a denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation.”

A vocation is not like a job in these respects. The word vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, “to call.” Although the term today can refer to any career or occupation (according to Webster), the word (vocatio, I imagine) was coined to describe the priestly calling to service in the church. So vocation=calling. This is how Peterson is using the word, anyway. And the struggle for pastors today, he continues, is to “keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description.” ...

... During his seminary education in New York City, Peterson worked with a group of artists. They were dancers and poets and sculptors, and they all worked blue-collar jobs as taxi drivers, waiters, and salesmen—whatever they had to do to pay the rent and put food on the table. Soon enough Peterson realized that “none of them were defined by their jobs—they were artists, whether anyone else saw them as artists, and regardless of whether anyone would ever pay them to be artists.” That is to say, being an artist wasn’t a job for them, but a vocation. Their jobs simply kept them alive so they could pursue their vocations. “Their vocation didn’t come from what anyone thought of them or paid them.” ...

...  But it sure would be nice to answer the question, “What do you do?” with a sentence that doesn’t begin, “Well, it’s complicated…”

Jobs pay the bills; vocations may or may not. I suspect bi-vocational pastors, as they’re called, must have a deeper sense of vocation than the rest of us. So many men and women who feel called to the ministry drop out when they can’t find a job at a church that’s big enough to pay their rent and student loans because we tend to think of ministry as the job that will put food on our tables. I admire the men and women who do what they have to for a living so they can do what they are called to do for the kingdom.

Why didn't they tell us?: the racist & pro-segregation roots of the formation of RTS, the PCA, and the role of First Prez in Jackson, Miss in all of it

The Institute: Why didn't they tell us?: the racist & pro-segregation roots of the formation of RTS, the PCA, and the role of First Prez in Jackson, Miss in all of it

I missed this post by Anthony Bradley  from two weeks ago as the PCUSA General Assembly was getting underway. Important stuff!

Peter Slade's book Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and A Theology of Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2009) reveals difficult information about the racist and pro-segregationist formation of the Reformed Theological Seminary, the Presbyterian Church in America, and the role of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.

If you're black in the PCA this book will be very, very hard to read. Sorry folks, the racial history of the denomination is more than just a "blind spot." According to Slade, there was more going on.

I am amazed that people outside of the PCA know more about the denomination's history than it's own members it seems.

After reading this history I have been struggling to answer why: (1) no one talks about these facts in general and (2) why were several of us blacks were not told about this in the early 1990s when many of us came into to the PCA? Why didn't anyone tell us the following as described in Slade's book 15-20 years ago: ...

... For those us African Americans who came into the PCA in early 1990s (I came in 1994) and have been committed ever since (we're not going anywhere), I don't understand why Peter Slade, a United Methodist, has been courageous enough to bring these things to light. Why is the racial history never told as a part of the PCA's history? Why did I have to find this out after-the-fact? Why am I learning these things from a United Methodist? Why haven't I been told these details by Presbyterians?

For at least 6 YEARS I have been repeatedly, and regularly called "nigger," "Anthony Bradley, the Negro Prince of the PCA," "The Token Negro and Filthy Pervert and a Stain on the Bedsheets of Life," "Anthony Bradley, the Affirmative Action Ph.D," and other racial slurs all over the internet since some white Reformed people discovered me; and it has not stopped. I had no idea what I was getting myself into in the early 1990's and nobody told me what to expect. I have been completely caught of guard and I'm lucky to get a shoulder shrug from people who knew this would happen. Why didn't anyone tell us? ...

The Nuclear Option

Slate: The Nuclear Option

Is atomic energy clean and green?

Some environmentalists are indeed coming around to nuclear energy. That's because the nuclear fission process produces virtually no greenhouse gas emissions—unlike the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. (Those two accounted for about 70 percent of the United States' electricity in 2008. Nukes made 20 percent.) In addition, nuclear fission differs from the burning of fossil fuel in that it produces neither sulfur dioxide nor nitrogen oxides, the pollutants that cause acid rain. Finally, nuclear power can provide a reliable, steady stream of electricity that's not dependent on a shining sun or blowing winds, giving it an advantage—in some people's minds—over its renewable competitors. ...

Lawrence Solomon: Global cooling underway

Financial Times: Lawrence Solomon: Global cooling underway

... The study, authored by Qing-Bin Lu, a rising star at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, explains why climate models have been so spectacularly wrong in trying to tie the global warming of the last half of the 20th century to CO2 — the climate modelers fingered the wrong culprit when they targeted CO2. The true culprits, Dr. Lu explains, were CFCs, the now banned substances that until the 1990s had been a refrigerant and propellant to products as diverse as air conditioners and hair spray cans.

Fortunately for the globe, environmentalists had CFCs banned because of their role in depleting the ozone layer, not realizing that the ban was simultaneously solving the global warming threat. ...

Well, this one I haven't heard before.

Is World Cup soccer socialist?

Christian Science Monitor: Is World Cup soccer socialist?

No, and Americans -- especially conservatives -- should embrace soccer as a democratic and meritocratic game.  ...

... At a deeper level, many Americans – especially conservatives – resent having soccer foisted upon them. Glenn Beck rants, “We don’t want the Word Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.” The late Jack Kemp even opposed a congressional resolution supporting US efforts to host the 1994 World Cup, stating, “a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist [sport].”

But soccer has plenty to offer Americans of all political stripes. For one, when you take in a soccer match, though goals may be scarce, you’ll be watching 90 minutes of almost nonstop action (not commercials!).

Let’s compare that with America’s favorite spectator sport, professional football. According to a Wall Street Journal study, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL games is less than 11 minutes. The remainder of the 174 minutes that make-up a typical broadcast are filled with images of players huddling and milling around, images of coaches and referees and, of course, commercials. ...

... For conservative hold-outs, soccer may be the most capitalist game going. In most American sports leagues, failure is rewarded as the worst teams get the best shots at the top draft picks, and most leagues have revenue sharing and salary caps to spread the wealth around.

In contrast, the free market reins in most European soccer leagues. Teams that finish last must move to a lower division the following year, while the best of the lower divisions move up. It’s the ultimate meritocracy. ...

... America’s ambivalence toward soccer probably has less to do with politics or lack of scoring than with our already saturated sports market. But we are a sports-loving nation. And as our exposure to soccer continues, I believe we’ll find room for one more sport to love.

You may have been at the Presbyterian General Assembly too long if ...

You go to your computer in the morning and wonder why no one has left a bag of candies at your chair.

You meet strangers in line at Quick Trip and ask what presbytery they’re from.

You go out for pizza and when someone orders anchovies you rise to make a substitute motion.

You keep clicking the TV remote and wonder why it won’t register your vote.

You find yourself wondering around the sanctuary during the Sunday sermon looking for an orange paddle to move the previous question.

Got any others?

Netherlands or Spain?

I lean toward the Netherlands but Spain seems to have regained their stride. What do you think?

Evangelicals better than mainliners at retaining youth, researcher says

Associated Baptist Press: Evangelicals better than mainliners at retaining youth, researcher says

DURHAM, N.C. (ABP) -- Evangelical churches do a better job than mainline churches in keeping their young people in the faith, probably because they invest more money in youth ministry, says a Duke University professor who studies characteristics of American congregations.

Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology, religion and divinity and director of the National Congregations Study, said in a blog post July 8 that research from the ongoing survey about the basic characteristics of America's congregations confirms that religious groups prioritize youth ministry differently.

Among churches that have 50 or more teenagers, Chaves said white evangelical congregations are substantially more likely than mainline Protestant churches to employ a full-time youth minister.

Fifty-nine percent of evangelical churches with 50-99 teens have a full-time youth minister, compared to only one-third of mainline churches with that many youth. In churches with more than 100 youth, the gap increases to 87 percent for evangelicals to 55 percent of mainline churches.

Chaves said mainline and evangelical Protestants do not differ much on overall programming for youth. Both are equally likely to have youth groups, teen choirs, youth speaking in worship services and to have sent teenagers to a church camp.

But those ministries "are inexpensive compared to hiring a full-time youth minister, and having a full-time youth minister surely enhances the quantity and quality of a church’s teen programming," the researcher noted. ...

I'll be Back

You may have noticed a significant drop off in posts here at Kruse Kronicle. I've fallen into the black hole of the PCUSA General Assembly. I was there from after breakfast until after 11:00 pm last night and the convention hall has not internet access. It makes blogging a challenge. I expect to reach escape velocity by tomorrow afternoon. The Kronicler will be  back to business next week.

Today at GA

Today at GA we renewed the "Growing Christ's Church Deep And Wide" initiative, renewed Linda Valentine as GAMC Exec for 4 more years, and sent the new form of government out be voted on by presbyteries. Below is a pic of Heartlands own Landon Whitsitt, the new vice-moderator, moderating the FOG debate.

Discussion Resources for Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson

Victor Claar's Economics Blog: Discussion Resources for Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson

... Our other book is the classic Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.  For those unfamiliar with Hazlitt, he was one of America's finest communicators of economic ideas during his prolific career as a journalist that included writing a regular column for Newsweek, as well as serving as a frequent reviewer for the prestigious New York Times Review of Books. If you have never read Economics in One Lesson, you should.  I can think of no other book that communicates the single greatest lesson of economics so succinctly and that also applies that single lesson to such a broad variety of topics so deftly.

Because we will be using Economics in One Lesson to stimulate discussion on a broad variety of both macro- micro-economic topics, I am putting together a collection of discussion questions linked to each of the book's chapters.  It turns out that a few other minds have already been at work on this topic, and have made the fruits of their efforts available on the web.  This present blog post, then, will serve as a road map for any readers who may be working at a similar task--putting together some discussion questions for Economics in One Lesson.  In the remainder of the post I will point to the resources I have already found.  If any of you know of others I may have omitted, I hope you will post a link to them in the comments section of this post. ...

Committee 13, Intl Peacemaking

Here is a picture of committee 13 where I spent the last two days. Also a pic of gentleman from Columbia was giving testimony about circumstances in Columbia through a translator. We covered an interesting array of issues. All in all it was a very good committee.

American Geologist Is Jailed For 8 Years In China

NPR: American Geologist Is Jailed For 8 Years In China

... Later allowed visits by U.S. consular officers, Xue told them he wanted his case made public. However, his wife, who lives in Texas, disagreed, believing that quiet lobbying might be more effective and fearing that the publicity would trouble their two children and possibly jeopardize her relatives still living in China. Amid their disagreement, the U.S. State Department pursued back-channel diplomacy.

Meanwhile, the case was batted between the court and prosecutors. All told, he appeared three times in court before Monday's hearing, the first in July a year ago and the last in December. The court then repeatedly postponed sentencing. Legal experts said the delays in issuing a verdict exceeded legal time limits; Xue's lawyer said a decision should have come in March at the latest.

The lapses illustrate a growing willingness by the authoritarian government to ignore laws to suit political interests.

"There's an increasing number of cases where there's no legal fig leaf," Jerome Cohen, a venerable China law expert at New York University who has advised Xue's wife, said in an interview before the verdict. "These are increasingly apparent, visible signs of lawlessness."

Chinese officials have wide authority to define state secrets, and the latitude makes it difficult for foreigners and Chinese alike to know when they are crossing the line.  ...

A critical piece to effective market economies is for business people to be able to reliably assess the economic and legal ramifications of decisions they make. This is the part a find interesting to watch with China. Can you have a sustainable market economy with this kind of arbitrary and extreme treatment of people? Who does China work this out?

Author tells GA breakfast-goers how cultural shift changes society, religion

219th General Assembly: Author tells GA breakfast-goers how cultural shift changes society, religion

Though membership numbers are declining, Christianity is growing.

“Let us hear about this crazy thing God is doing with the church.” That was the invitation of the Rev. Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, to the capacity crowd at the 219th General Assembly (2010) breakfast Monday. His invitation was illuminated later by the breakfast’s speaker, Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence; How Christianity is Changing and Why.

Tickle, a former Presbyterian “seduced by the smells and bells of Anglicanism” at 17, spoke with appreciation of coming home to her natal community. “I will always have the warmest spot in my heart for those first 17 years, and a real gratitude about what I was taught … about the Bible,” she said.

Tickle began by referencing the work of Anglican Bishop Mark Dyer, who contends that every 500 years the church has “a giant rummage sale.” She cited the Great Reformation of the 16th century, the Great Schism of the 11th century, the Great Decline and Fall of the 6th century, and the Great Transformation 500 years before that as examples.

“This is a Judeo-Christian phenomenon,” Tickle said. “If we were more ecumenical, we would also include Islam, which seems to go through the same 500-year cycle.”

Tickle applies the “rummage sale” theory to all of society. “Across the board, everything changes. Economically, intellectually, politically, everything shifts.” ...

My day began with this meeting. Interesting presentation. Basically spent the day bouncing between committees. I hope to write more when there is time. I'm assigned to Committee #13, Peacemaking. So far it is has been great committee with great leadership. The big question is whether we can get all the business done by 5:00 pm so Mikey can go play. :-)

Cynthia Bolbach elected Moderator

219th General Assembly: Cynthia Bolbach elected Moderator on fourth ballot

Cynthia Bolbach, an elder from National Capital Presbytery, was elected Saturday night as Moderator of the 219th General Assembly (2010) on the fourth ballot. She was the only elder in a field of six candidates.

Bolbach employed brief answers and a winsome sense of humor to win over the 712 commissioners and steadily gained ground, rising from 149 votes (30 percent) on the first ballot to 325 votes (53 percent) on the decisive fourth ballot. None of the other five candidates exceeded 23 percent of the vote on any ballot. ...

... Bolbach told the commissioners, “I love being a Presbyterian elder. I cherish the equality that the church gives to ministers and elders. In fact, elder commissioners have an advantage: Elders rule!” she said, referring to a recommendation from the Form of Government Task Force, which she has chaired for four years, that the church return to using the term “ruling elder.”

Bolbach likened the PC(USA) to the man who was paralyzed in Luke 5 whose friends lowered him through a hole they knocked in the roof so he could be healed by Jesus. “Our denomination is that paralyzed man,” she said, “paralyzed by fatigue, uncertainty, fear, grief over the loss of the kind of church some of us have known and loved all our lives.”

“We are more than just commissioners,” she told her colleagues in the hall. “We are the friends … who have to figure out how to break through these roofs, to bring our paralyzed church to Jesus Christ, to give our paralyzed denomination to Jesus, so Jesus can start the healing.” ...

Well, last night I had visions of OGA people in a back room counting hanging chads but we got it done. How cool that the one elder prevailed. :-) I look forward to working with Cynthia over the next two years. I thing she is bringing some critical gifts at a critical time.

"Neither Poverty Nor Riches" - A Critical Response

I am a commissioner to the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., this week. An item of business at the Assembly is called Neither Poverty Nor Riches: Compensation, Equity, and the Unity of the Church, (NPNR) (Item 10-10), from the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP). It addresses employee compensation within the church. Over the past two years it has been my privilege to serve as vice-chair of the General Assembly Mission Council (GAMC) and as chair of the GAMC personnel committee. That gives me some insight into the subject. Furthermore, I’ve spent the better part of my adult exploring the intersection of business, economics, and theology. What follows is my reflection and response. It is my view and is not an official comment of the General Assembly Mission Council. I will declare from the start that I am opposed to this item.

The overture and the underlying study paper advocates equity in compensation for church employees, with equity defined as employees receiving similar compensation via ratios of highest-paid to lowest-paid employee. The idea of salary ratios was promoted In a policy paper called God’s Work in Our Hands, passed by the 207th General Assembly (1995). The narrative woven in NPNR is that church, and the General Assembly Mission Council in particular, has succumbed to “secular” business models of compensation and abandoned theological reflection in its hiring practices. NPNR seeks the imposition of a mandatory 5:1 compensation ratio from lowest-paid to highest-paid staff at the General Assembly Mission Council in order to achieve a biblical equality.

There are two puzzling aspects to NPNR:

• The imposed 5:1 ratio is directed only at the General Assembly Mission Council, despite that fact that other GA entities like the Presbyterian Foundation and the Board of Pensions have higher ratios than the GAMC. (A fact the study paper readily acknowledges.)
• NPNR makes no mention (except for a cursory mention at the end of Appendix in the study paper) of the extensive debate and policy development that occurred between 1999 and 2002 that resulted in our present compensation guidelines.

NPNR defines equity as similar compensation for all employees. But there are at least three ways to conceive of equity:

• Everyone is paid the same regardless of duties or experience.
• Everyone is paid equitably according to personal need.
• Everyone is paid equitably according to skills and experience they use in their employment.

Equity in any one of these three means greater inequality in the other two. While most of us share a concern about extravagant compensation for leaders, most of also believe different types and amounts of work justify different compensation.

Not all ministry contexts are identical within the church. The ministry of word and sacrament is a unique specialized call that embeds pastors in particular community contexts. Rather than producing a product or service for compensation, ministers of word and sacrament are paid the equivalent of a stipend to free them from economically productive labor and to focus on study, teaching, preaching, and shepherding. Mission co-workers, whose compensation model is lauded in NPNR, have similar circumstances. But not all are in agreement that this model is inviolate. The evolution of congregational ministry has led to pastors in some congregations taking on specialized management responsibilities that make the compensation question more complex. A growing number of pastors are exploring the tent-making model of ministry and some advocate that having pastors at work in the economy helps pastors better appreciate the daily lives of those they serve.

Not all who serve the church do so in the unique roles of minster of word and sacrament or mission co-worker. But are ALL employees of the church to be compensated as people in these roles are? The collective wisdom of the church has been that they are not. Many who serve the church do so through contractual agreements to be compensated for the performance of specified tasks that frequently require specialized training and experience. While it is understood that compensation for these services will not compare with compensation in the for-profit sector, there is still a sense that equity demands that employees be paid a wage comparable to what other similarly situated people in similar organizations receive. So how do we sort out the myriad of issues when it comes to compensating employees in our denomination?

This isn’t the first time this issue has arisen. The issue arose in the late 1990s. Task forces were formed and General Assembly’s from 1999 through 2002 gave extensive attention to compensation. The 2001 minutes lists guidelines based on fourteen principles of compensation, reiterating previous discernment (See Report from the General Assembly Advisory Committee on Churchwide Compensation (2001).) For example here are few excerpts:

Principle Two—Mission

The fulfillment of the church’s mission calls for effective, competent staff throughout the church and appropriate compensation to attract and retain them.

Principle Five—Basic

Factors to be considered when setting compensation should include the nature, purpose, scope, and responsibility of the position; the experience, knowledge, and skills required; the challenge of the work to be done and its impact on the effectiveness with which the church achieves its mission.

Principle Ten—Recruiting

The system of compensation should ensure that all church employees are compensated according to the following criteria:

• Employees recruited locally should be paid within salary ranges related to the average salaries paid by employers in that location for comparable positions requiring similar skills and experience.
• Employees recruited regionally or nationally should be paid within salary ranges related to the average salaries regionally or nationally paid by employers for comparable positions in comparable organizations requiring similar skills and experience, modified to reflect the cost of living in the locale where the work is done.

Principle Eleven—Salary Relationships/Stewardship

The Church is one Body with varieties of gifts, and each person’s contribution to its mission is important. The church recognizes the value of all varieties of service and seeks to temper the values and rewards of the marketplace. A reasonable relationship between the highest and the lowest salaries paid to all church employees honors the principle of shared community and call.

In maintaining a relationship between the highest and lowest salaries, lower levels of compensation should be comparable to or better than the average salaries paid in the marketplace, but not so far above the average that good stewardship of the church’s funds is compromised. Salaries at the top levels should reflect a tempering of excessive compensation.

The GAMC provides a wide range of services requiring an array of specialties. There are office mangers, information specialists, attorneys, theologians, policy experts, and mail room workers, to name but a few. Some positions are rather standard across many other types of organizations while others require highly specific skill sets. That makes development of compensation packages challenging but the GAMC compensation is always guided by General Assembly’s guiding principles.

For example, in keeping with the second paragraph of principle number eleven above, when salary, wages, and benefits are combined for our lowest paying positions, the GAMC’s total compensation is above median compensation for similar religious and nonprofit organizations. The compensation for the highest paid employees is between the 25 and the 50th percentile for similar positions.

Particularly troubling for me is this sentence from the NPNR study guide:

The General Assembly Mission Council (GAMC) functions through a human resources department, headed by a lay human resources professional, who is aware of functioning within a church, but is guided by secular professional standards and best practices, rather than by theological or biblical understanding. …

ACSWP and the authors of NPNR may not be content with how compensation policy is done at the GAMC. It is certainly within their scope to raise such questions. But I have been on the GAMC board for six years and chaired the personnel committee. We have had conversations with ACSWP about a variety of issues including extensive debate over the GAMC Employee Handbook and policies. Not until NPNR surfaced at this General Assembly have I heard one word about salary ratios.

 I can tell you that the GAMC human resources director is indeed a professional. I can tell you she loves Jesus and has a heart for the mission of the church. I can also tell you she does not unilaterally create personnel policy. She significantly contributes to its formation within the context of those who labor at the GAMC and the elected members who provide oversight. And she, like the rest of us, has been guided by the policies of the General Assembly. It is one thing to disagree with the current state of affairs but quite another to impugn the service of the HR director because she is complying with the directives of the General Assembly.

There is clear tone of clericalism and condescension in the identification of “lay human resources professional,” as though a theological degree somehow makes one uniquely qualified to run a human resources department. I can tell you that I would prefer a lay surgeon, a lay police officer, and a lay building contractor in the execution of their work to someone who has a theology degree as their defining credential. So would I much prefer working with a “lay human resources professional” who loves Jesus, who has a sense of call, and works in community with others of the faith to do her work. That is precisely what we have. Singling out a staff person for insolent remarks in a denomination wide study paper is unjust.  

Other aspects of the report concern me as well. Appendix A states:

It [the compensation ratio] is now a nine to one ratio in the General Assembly Mission Council, with wider ranges in the Board of Pensions (BOP) and Presbyterian Foundation (FDN) and the most compact range in the Office of the General Assembly (OGA).

This is erroneous. I don’t know the exact ratios at the other entities but it is not that high at the GAMC. NPNR simply asserts this ratio with no documentation. Neither is there any comparative data to show how the General Assembly entities compare to each other or to similar entities outside the denomination.

ACSWP is the General Assembly’s appointed guardian of social witness policy. Yet in this instance, they have reverted to pre-1999 policy statements to make a case for ratios while offering no interaction with policies that formed from 1999 to 2002 that explicitly rejected the use of ratios. Indeed, without careful observation one could not be blamed for getting the sense that the policies of pre-1999 are still in effect but unheeded. Furthermore, unsubstantiated claims are being made about compensation at the GAMC while lauding the performance of other entities with higher ratios.

The General Assembly Mission Council takes compensation issues very seriously. Compensation is set according to a variety of variables all within the theological context of Christian service. The current GA policies contain considerable wisdom and judicious balance between competing concerns. The GAMC has been served well by the GA’s guidance on compensation and for that reason I will oppose item 10-10 and I’m encouraging my fellow commissioners at this assembly to do likewise.

The New PCUSA Website is Here!

When I first came on the General Assembly Mission Council six years, one of my biggest concerns was the woefully inadequate website we had for the denomination. About four years ago the movement to overhaul our entire web presence and gained traction. I personally went to the mat on the need to make this a priority when some wavered. Today the new websites is up and I love it! Kudos to to the GAMC staff and the years of work that went into making this innovation possible. Check out the site: www.pcusa.org

Complex, Multicellular Life from Over Two Billion Years Ago Discovered

Science Daily: Complex, Multicellular Life from Over Two Billion Years Ago Discovered

ScienceDaily (July 1, 2010) — The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago.

These new fossils, of various shapes and sizes, imply that the origin of organized life is a lot older than is generally admitted, thus challenging current knowledge on the beginning of life. These specimens were discovered and studied by an international (1) multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Abderrazak El Albani of the Laboratoire "Hydrogéologie, Argiles, Sols et Altérations" (CNRS/Université de Poitiers) (2). Their work, due to be published in Nature on 1st July, will feature on the cover of the journal. ...